Desus Nice Walks Offstage Amanda Seales' 'Smart Funny & Black' Event

Getty Images

Amanda Seales And Desus Nice Get Into It At NYC Event

Smart Funny & Black–created by Insecure’s Amanda Seales–is an event aimed at bringing popular comedians and celebrities together to compete in head to head battles that test their knowledge of black history, black culture, and the black experience. Amanda and her crew are currently touring through 10 U.S. cities with different guests every night, and of course, that wouldn’t be complete without touching down in NYC.

When it was announced that The Bodega Boys’ Desus Nice would be in attendance for the first Brooklyn show on August 2, it came as a surprise to many fans. Nice and Seales have a bit of a cloudy history together, which stems from Desus’ comedy partner The Kid Mero letting off wild tweets regarding Amanda as far back as 2012.

Insanely off-color jokes (especially on Twitter) are nothing new for Mero, but it still came as a shock that Seales agreed to be a guest on Desus & Mero’s VICELAND show after all that.

She pressed Mero about his Tweets and though their was some obvious tension, it seems like they resolved their online beef and put it behind them.

Fast forward to the present day, Desus ended up going head-to-head with Joe Budden onstage at The Bell House in Brooklyn for Smart Funny & Black. Some behind the scenes footage of the event from earlier this month was released, and it looks like the Bronx native and the Insecure star butt heads onstage.

The footage shows some friendly back-and-forth between Desus and Budden while they get ready to compete, but Amanda wasn’t having some of Nice’s jokes. Joe tells Desus, “you better knock it out the park” to which he quips back, “or else, what? I don’t get money if I win this s**t.”

It looks Seales took his comment personally, since she was the one who invited everyone to perform for free, responding “do you wanna just leave?” Desus brushed that off and insisted everyone was just having a good time–but that was only the beginning of it.

The next clip cuts to Desus telling another joke, which was met with some moans and groans by the audience. He backed it up with, “If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you got this lightskin n***a here.”

Though this joke seems pretty on brand for Nice’s humor, Amanda once again isn’t with it, and asked, “Y’all gonna berate the crowd the whole time?” She then goes on to comment on Desus’ previous joke saying, “if they don’t like it, it’s cause it wasn’t funny.”

It’s clear that Nice was done with being tested by both the crowd and the host onstage, and actually ended up walking off and leaving the event early because she was “trying to play [him] onstage.”

Amanda is shown talking about the incident afterward as well, and says that she perceived Desus’ comments about not being paid to be disrespectful. She also claims that Nice was both drunk and “insecure,” which is her explanation for what led to their disagreements.

To Desus’ credit though, he almost always performs with liquor (or Becks) in his system, so it would be surprising for that to cause any out of the ordinary behavior for him.

What do y’all think? Was Amanda wrong for going in on her own guest in front of the entire crowd? Should Desus have stayed till the end despite him feeling disrespected?